Visualising your book

Booki provides an RSS feed for every book. This means you can follow a book and see the edits made. Each RSS feed is linked from the info page. For example, the book about OpenMRS has an info page here and the RSS is linked from the bottom.

A few weeks ago, we asked for some help creating a visualisation using this source. Pierre Commenge responded and started developing a Processing visualisation of the RSS feed. Processing is a free software used a lot for creating visualisations.

Pierre has a prototype available that runs in a java applet. So this look pretty cool. The live version enables you to play a timeline and see the development of the book over the period of 1 day.

This not only looks cool but it enables you to see how a book is being made. This is extremely interesting – imagine if we had all the data about how every book has been made up until now… it would tell us a lot of things about the book production process and the differences between different models etc… It’s a very exciting idea and we hope to be able to explode this idea in the following weeks and months in our experiments. Many thanks to Pierre for getting this underway.